Impeach Attorney General Holder - for Justice's Sake

This week, I am grateful I am not a civics teacher.  The entire legal and constitutional framework under which we believe we live seemed to have been turned upside-down.  To start with, as former U.S. Appeals Judge Michael McConnell argued so well, Obama’s suspension of the employer mandate of ObamaCare conflicts with his obligations under Article II, Sec 3 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to “refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.”

Attorneys general under Presidents Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton all agreed on this point. With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress were struck down by the courts, no prior president has claimed the power to negate a law that is concededly constitutional.

In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court inClinton v. City of New York, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”

To be sure, in less significant ways, Obama has also suspended the operation of valid laws.  As McConnell notes, Obama is ignoring immigration law by suspending  deportation proceedings “against some 800,000 illegal immigrants.”

McConnell warns Democrats that this unfortunate precedent may haunt them when a Republican takes over the White house and follows it.  Worse, it seems, and he also notes, “[w]hy bother debating the details of a compromise if future presidents will feel free to disregard those parts of the statute they don’t like?”

Court resolution of this overreaching and constitutional violation is not certain, because it’s unclear whether any citizen would meet the threshold standing issue to bring suit.  It’s hard to see what “personal stake” sufficient to permit such a suit private citizens would have.